page_title: Woodham Mortimer
section_title: Landmarks
hierarchical_section_title: Woodham Mortimer / Culture and facilities / Landmarks
caption_attribution_description: English: Woodham Mortimer Memorial. The obelisk on the left is an 1825 memorial to William Alexander Esq. a Philanthropist who left his estate lands to the poor of the Company of Coopers London. The house in the background was the home of Pioneer Obstetricians Doctors Peter (1601-1683 and Hugh (1630-1720) Chamberlen.
context_page_description: Woodham Mortimer is a village on the Dengie peninsula about three miles west-south-west of Maldon in the English county of Essex. The village is part of the Wickham Bishops and Woodham ward of the Maldon district.
context_section_description: Woodham Mortimer Hall is a 17th-century gabled house that Hugh and Peter Chamberlen lived in. There is a blue plaque fixed to the hall noting them as pioneering obstetricians who invented the forceps. The hall passed out of the Chamberlen family in 1715 when the family home was sold. The forceps were found in 1813 under a trap door in the loft of the hall and given to the Medical and Chirurgical Society which passed them to the Royal Society of Medicine in 1818. The find was described by R. Lee in Observations on the Discovery of the Original Obstetric Instruments of the Chamberlens (1862) as:
  The [space] contained some boxes in which were two or three pairs of midwifery forceps, several coins, a medallion of Charles I, or II, a miniature of the Doctor damaged by time, a tooth wrapped in paper, written on, "My husband's last tooth"; some little antique plate; a pair of ladys long yellow kid gloves, in excellent preservation; a small testament date 1645.
  There is a war memorial commemorating the nine people from the village who died during the World Wars. There is also a Grade II listed memorial erected in 1825 to William Alexander, who left his lands to the Worshipful Company of Coopers for the benefit of the poor.
  Woodham Mortimer Lodge is a Grade II listed building.
caption: Memorial to William Alexander by Glyn Baker
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